During this time Partridge also worked for three years as a schoolteacher before enrolling in the Australian Imperial Force in April 1915 and serving in the Australian infantry during the First World War,[6] serving in Egypt, Gallipoli and on the Western Front,[1] before being wounded in the Battle of Pozières.[6] His interest in slang and the "underside" of language is said to date from his wartime experience.[7] Partridge returned to university between 1919 and 1921, when he received his BA.[6]

After receiving his degree, Partridge became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford,[6] where he worked on both an MA on eighteenth-century English romantic poetry, and a B.Litt in comparative literature.[8] He subsequently taught in a grammar school in Lancashire for a brief interval, then in the two years beginning September 1925, took lecturing positions at the Universities of Manchester and London.[1][9] From 1923, he "found a second home", occupying the same desk (K1) in the British Museum Library (as it was then known) for the next fifty years. In 1925 he married Agnes Dora Vye-Parminter, who in 1933 bore a daughter, Rosemary Ethel Honeywood Mann.[1][10] In 1927 he founded the Scholartis Press, which he managed until it closed in 1931.[11]

During the twenties he wrote fiction under the pseudonym 'Corrie Denison'; Glimpses, a book of stories and sketches, was published by the Scholartis Press in 1928. The Scholartis Press published over 60 books in these four years,[1] including Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914-1918, which Partridge co-authored with John Brophy. From 1932 he commenced writing in earnest. His next major work on slang, Slang Today and Yesterday, appeared in 1933, and his well-known Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English followed in 1937.[1]

Songs and Slang of the British Soldier (with John Brophy), Scholartis Press, 1931.

A Charm of Words. New York, Macmillan Co., 1961 (copyright 1960)

A New Testament Word Book: a Glossary. London, George Routledge & Sons, 1940. Republished New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1970. The 1987 republication by the Christian publisher Barbour & Company of Uhricksville, Ohio as The Book of New Testament Word Studies, with copyright claimed by the publisher, appears to be a copyright violation.

The 'Shaggy Dog' Story. New York, Philosophical Library, 1954

A Dictionary of the Underworld. London, Macmillan Co., 1949; reprinted with new addenda, New York, Bonanza Books, 1961